Lord Bethell

12:01AM BST 11 Sep 2007

The 4th Lord Bethell, who died on Saturday aged 69, was a hereditary peer, Conservative member of the European Parliament, writer, and an unsung hero of the Cold War.

From the 1960s Bethell quietly and persistently sought to mobilise opinion against the Communist dictators of eastern Europe, and for the release of Soviet dissidents; among those he helped were Irina Ratushinskaya, Vladimir Bukovsky, Oleg Gordievsky, and the Sakharovs. For this he was denigrated by the KGB, Private Eye, the Foreign Office, and the former Conservative prime minister, Ted Heath.

A House of Lords whip in the early 1970s and MEP for London North West from 1975 to 1994, then for London Central from 1999, Bethell, tall, stooping and with a quick, nervous smile, and furtive, sidelong glances, seemed almost to embody the cloak-and-dagger world in which he moved.

He was the author of seven books, mainly on the history of Communism in eastern Europe. His most important book, The Last Secret (1974), broke to the British public the story of the part played by the British V Corps after the end of the Second World War in handing over two million White Russian refugees to death or imprisonment in Soviet camps.

The book, the forerunner of Count Tolstoy's better known but more polemical Victims of Yalta, told a horrifying story with restraint and balance, and was made into a television documentary, Cossacks, in 1974. As a result of Bethell's book, in 1980 Mrs Thatcher personally overruled objections from the Foreign Office to the erection of a memorial to the Yalta victims.

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As well as writing historical works Bethell also translated into English novels and plays by Russian and Polish writers, notably Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward (published in English in 1968). The story of how Bethell arranged for its publication in the West was a plot worthy of Le Carré, but ended in a bitter row with Solzhenitsyn.

According to Bethell, Solzhenitsyn had passed the manuscript of the book to Pavel Lichko, a Slovakian journalist, during an interview in 1967. Lichko had then passed it to Bethell in Prague in 1968, claiming that Solzhenitsyn had given him full permission to sell the rights to Bodley Head.

But in 1971 Private Eye carried a story by Auberon Waugh suggesting that in arranging for the publication of Cancer Ward Bethell made possible Solzhenitsyn's arrest on charges of circulating anti-Soviet propaganda, and that Bethell had been working - wittingly or otherwise - for the KGB. Bethell sued for libel and won. But in his autobiography, published in the 1990s, Solzhenitsyn added to the mystery by accusing Bethell of selling his novel without permission, landing him in trouble with the KGB. "I've come to the conclusion," observed Bethell ruefully, "that Solzhenitsyn is a stubborn, ruthless man who has never been grateful to those who have tried to help him."

The plot thickened still further when, in his memoir Spies and Other Secrets (1994), Bethell recalled how Edward Heath had vetoed his inclusion on the list of Conservative candidates for seats in the European Parliament. "Ted won't have you in the team," an embarrassed government chief whip told him. "We sent your name in for Europe, but Ted crossed it off. MI5 and MI6 advised him against you."

At the same time, though, Bethell was being accused in the Czechoslovakian press of being an agent of MI6: "It was a sad state to be in," he reflected, "accused by both sides in the Cold War of working for the secret intelligence of the other."

Nicholas William Bethell was born on July 19 1938. His father William Bethell, a stockbroker, was the third son of the 1st Lord Bethell, a long-serving MP who had made his fortune in the City and had been created a baronet in 1911 and raised to the peerage as the 1st Baron Bethell of Romford in 1922. Nicholas Bethell could recall visiting, as a child, his grandfather's mansion, Bushey House in Hertfordshire. But after his grandfather's death in 1945 the house was sold for £30,000 to meet death duties. It was the end of the Bethell fortune.

Bethell was educated at Harrow, and during National Service in the late 1950s was trained as a Russian interpreter. He studied Arabic and Persian at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and, after graduating, worked for two years for the Times Literary Supplement before joining the BBC as an assistant script writer.

While at Cambridge Bethell had befriended some Polish students who invited him to visit their country. He became fascinated, and returned many times. In 1959, with a party of Cambridge students, he paid his first visit to the Soviet Union.

In 1969 he published his first book, Gomulka: his Poland and his Communism, a lucid and intelligent account of the Polish leader Wladisalw Gomulka, who came to power as Poland's "freedom fighter" in 1956.

In 1967 Nicholas's cousin Guy, the third Lord Bethell, was found dead aged 39 in a guest house at Tenby; Nicholas, whose father had died three years previously, succeeded to the title as the 4th Lord Bethell, taking his seat on the Conservative benches.

Following the 1970 election Bethell, to his great surprise, was appointed a government whip, but a year later he was effectively forced to resign in order to fight the libel action against Private Eye.

The circumstances surrounding the Private Eye action threatened to destroy his career and reputation, and Bethell remained intrigued to discover exactly why Heath had vetoed his inclusion in the list of Conservative candidates for the European Parliament even after he had won his libel case.

But even after losing the 1974 general election, Heath refused to discuss the matter, replying dismissively to Bethell's letters. "He was not prepared to give his former junior employee a minute of his time. He was busy and it was all too embarrassing," Bethell observed. In the 1990s Heath finally agreed to a meeting with Bethell, only to cancel their appointment at the last moment, saying there was nothing to discuss.

In The War Hitler Won: September 1939 (1972), Bethell recounted the story of the Blitzkreig against Poland. The Palestine Triangle (1979) examined the background to the birth of the state of Israel.

With the election of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative Party, Bethell's political fortunes turned the corner and he sat as a member of the unelected European Assembly from 1975. He was elected MEP for London North West in 1979, holding the seat until 1994.

Bethell proved one of the most populist and visible of Britain's representatives in Europe, and in the 1980s led a spirited "Freedom of the Skies" campaign against the fixing of European air fares. In the early 1990s he campaigned for Gibraltarians to be given full British passports.

At the same time he stepped up his campaign to publicise human rights abuses in the Soviet Union and to secure the release of Soviet dissidents.

In 1983 he was banned from entering Russia as part of a tit-for-tat exercise, after the British government had expelled a Soviet diplomat from London. Bethell had produced a report on human rights in Russia in which he alleged that four per cent of the Soviet workforce were slave labourers.

His book The Great Betrayal: The Untold Story of Kim Philby's Biggest Coup (1984) recounted how information passed by Philby to the Russians had scuppered dissident movements in Albania. Spies and other Secrets (1994) was an autobiographical account of Bethell's Cold War dealings with the Soviet authorities. Bethell was re-elected to the European Parliament in 1999, but in 2001 revealed that he was suffering from Parkinson's disease.

Nicholas Bethell was twice married: first, in 1964 (dissolved 1971), to Cecilia Honeyman; and secondly, in 1992, to Bryony Griffiths. He is survived by his second wife and by their son, and by two sons of his first marriage.

Lord Bethell's eldest son, James, born in 1967, succeeds to the title.